You Don’T Do Crack Or Speed

You don’t do crack or speed or heroin;
you’re not lifting the moon like an eyelid
to find a new place to shoot,
but you’re boiling your heart in a spoon,
you’re thawing the six rocks of your emotions,
boiling away the seven oceans
that will get you through the night
as if you were another sign of global warming.
And now you’re weeping and raging in my living room,
violently shapeshifting through your withdrawal
like an exorcism gone wrong
because the latest hot lover
you got hooked on like a dealer
proved to be a snakeoil salesman in paradise
who convinced you the scales of your daring
would turn into feathers
and your falling take flight.
Not everybody who jumps from heaven makes hell;
for example, your heart there on that rock
you’re kicking around at your feet
like the skull of the world,
isn’t that the sun on your horizon
pouring out of its broken shell like the yoke
of another tragic casualty of spring
fallen like Icarus from the embryonic wax
of your exaggerated wingspan?
Love is not a form of substance abuse
and I’m not the local, walk-in rehab centre
you can duck into anytime
you’ve spent your last dime like a bullet
on a dealer that’s not reloading,
but pain is pain and I can feel yours
chaining itself to all your emergency doors
so that no one could ever get out
when you go hunting for yourself
like a contract you’ve taken out on a highschool.
But it isn’t the object of your longing,
the focus of the star, the shining
that you’re addicted to
like all those placebos and soothers
you keep calling boyfriends,
faking you’re better
everytime you take one:
you’re addicted to addiction.
You’re addicted to the promise you mean to keep.
And you can keep on
taking your clothes off like Christmas
and suffering the usual unwrapping depressions,
but you’re addicted to being a gift
that was meant for someone else
and it’s never your name that follows
the to or the from on the label
when you give yourself to Santa Claus
like a pimp in sable
and he addicts you to the starburn above the stable
that keeps making an ass of you
when the wise men take back their gifts.
So here you are again
before the perilous depths
of these precipitous cliffs
trashing your afflictions like female newborns
that were born of all that genetic junkmail
you once opened frantically like a loveletter
that wasn’t addressed to you
on the rocky threshold of the shore below
that looks up at you like the sickle of a smile
that reaps what you’ve sown,
but I know what you’ve always known:
that you’re addicted
to being unmarrowed by the moon
when the hummingbird who sipped honey
like gold from a cold stone
finds herself out of money and alone.
I can help you out with the cash flow
and though I know I’m not your drug of choice
measure my feelings out like methadone to ease the abyss,
but if you want my advice,
being addicted to addiction
is like trying to step into your own bloodstream twice
or drowning while diving for pearls
that have already risen like the full moon
and crossed you off the calendar
like the X that sucks the poison from the kiss.
Everyone longs for a night, a face, a space
they knew once even if just for the glance of a moment
when joy spiked the wine
and what was singularly human
rushed like a flashflood through the valleys
of the universally divine
and rain that had fallen like tears for years
on an ocean of sorrows
with no hope of flowers
suddenly bloomed like the moon’s corals
in the meadows of a mystic sea
and everything that could possibly be, was.
I knew that moment, for instance, once with you
but the inconceivable eventually
flows down into the believable
like stars into mountain streams
and we end up panning for the irretrievable
like a nugget of night
we lost in the moonbeams,
and impeaching each other
like credible constellations
that can’t shine out of the box,
we check the locks on the mine
and go our separate ways
like abused metals,
mutants of gold and lead
that couldn’t turn the one into the another
once the alchemy wore off
and the glass alembic
of another transformative cocoon
was shattered by the harvest stone
of an unphilosophical moon
and the pain was a change of species.
And you’re still the anti-muse of the butterfly effect
that inspires my chaos theory
of post-deconstructive poetry
when I strike one planet against another
like your heart against mine
looking for a spark
that might keep the universe warm for another night
but I know I can’t light the same fire again
or shoot the moon like silver
into the same exhausted vein
now all that matters is the next homeless hit
and this infinite choice of elixirs
that don’t quite do it
whenever I go looking for my voice
like a small word
in the ashes of a burning bush
or that bird of your phoenix heart
that once sang in me like you
and fell like an autumn cradle from the lullaby tree
that still calls to me sometimes
and still keeps me up
like the ghost of an albatross
wailing off the coast of a lost art
wounded like the black sail
of a loveletter on an unlucky wind.
But that doesn’t mean
I wait for you like a widower on the moon
for the last lifeboat that overturned in space
when the seas evaporated like the eyes in your face.
I’m not rummaging through my heart
like a medicine chest
for the three bells of the last all’s well
I can crush like the moon into a paste when I cry.
I’m not flagging my heart like a fit
sucking up the tranquil shadows
of the moons’s dead oceans
as if I could bind your heart again to me like a barrel,
a clown in a shipwreck he’s wearing for pants,
and go over your falls again as I once did
in a Niagara of love potions.
We’ve had that dance
and the music we heard in each other
was wine unique as night
to the glass that contained it like a body,
and I don’t need to seek again
in these lotions of rain that fall gently now
what was so wholly and incommensurately once
that in every dropp of water I feel you like the sea.
A truly enlightened junkie
only needs to hit once
and it’s good for a lifetime
so there’s never really any chance
of coming down from the people we’ve loved
who poured the stars into our abandoned wells
like a night wine that shunned the sun
so why all this talk about kites
that caught fire and crashed
and the new space shuttles
you keep wheeling up to your gantry
like all these love affairs you keep trying to launch
like a rave on ecstasy,
trying to swim with the stars
when you’re already flying
with the whole of creation
like the night sea of a black rose
that can only be seen
in the depths of its darkness
with eyes of wine
that have shed their petals and waves
like a sky that has let go of its lifeline?